Demeter Law

Let us talk today about the Demeter Law. It is a pattern of Object Orientation that helps us to lower our coupling, decrease our maintenance impact and the raise adaptability of our systems.

What is utility for those “weird” words? If you have to do any maintenance in your application, it will have a lesser impact; your classes will only know the classes that it should know, and your code changes will be quicker and with less impact in your system.

Just advantages in the Demeter law, right? Let us take it easy; in the end of this post we will see the disadvantage of this approach.

The code above will run as expected; we are coding to interface, our code is wellindented and well formatted. What could we do to “upgrade” our code?

The Demeter law says that a class may not know more then one friendly class. WHAT? Let us take small steps and analyze the code above; notice that our Main class wants to print the Person ZipCode, but to do this the Main class get to know two more classes. If you did not noticed, there is a coupling there.

To print de ZipCode our class Main is going through the Person, House and finally Address class. What is this a bad approaching? Imagine if out Annalist decide to remove our Address class from the system and the House class will be responsible to keep the ZipCode.

In our cod ewill be very easy to change; but imagine now if we had a huge system with the ZipCode printed for more than 100 code lines. You would have to change 100 lines of codes at your system.

The Demeter law came to help us with this kind of situation, with a little change in our Person and House classes; we can avoid this huge impact when we remove the Address class. Take a look in our new code.

Look at our new code, think now where you will need to change if you need to remove the Address class. Only the Home class will be edited, the rest of our code will remain the same.

This is the greatest advantage of the Demeter law. When you have to do maintenance your project will have a small impact. The new features will be easily adapted, simpler code editions, and with a small cost. In code that we saw today only one class would be impacted. The other classes of your system would remain the same and your system will have a small coupling.

The disadvantage of this approach is an impact on the system performance. You may have a low performance if you use this approach in loops like “While, For, …” .In this case you will have to see which code of your system will not have the performance impacted with the Demeter law.

I believe that even with this disadvantage in the performance in some code pieces this approach is useful and worth of use it in our systems; Demeter law could be used in almost all code of our system.

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